I understand that in oracle 10g, we can shink a table and compact it so that the high level water mark in the table will be reduced.

However, i would like to know. Through shrinking table, we won't be able to really reduce the datafile high level water mark in order to resize it as compared to move tables to another tablespace for re-org. am i right?

for example, in a tablespace consisting of 1 datafile, there are 10 tables. although we managed to shink (compact) the space in each indivdual table, we are not able to compact the space (gap) between the tables. am i right? only way is to move the table to another tablespace right?>

>>Through shrinking table, we won't be able to really reduce the datafile high level water mark in order to resize it
I think that reduce the datafile it's possible, because that HWM are adjusted to an appropriate location and unused space is deallocated from the segments, so it is available for the tablespace to reallocate to other objects as needed ... Have you tried to make a test?

SHRINK may cause Oracle to deallocate one or more extents of a table.
However, remember that a tablespace contains multiple segments -- each table,
index, lobsegment etc is a segment with multiple extents.
Thus, at the datafile HWM, you could very well have extent(s) belonging to some
other table(s) apart from the one(s) you did a SHRINK for.
It would be those other extents which would prevent you from resizing the datafile.

>>It would be those other extents which would prevent you from resizing the datafile.
Ok, I mean if all segments contained in a tablespace has been shrunk, so, I think it's possible to reduce the size of the datafile ...

If, after you go through all the effort to SHRINK all or most segments in the
tablespace (datafile), you find that you need to or you decide to do a MOVE,
it might have made more sense to have actually done the MOVE upfront.
A MOVE also does an implicit shrink, except that it requires downtime.
A SHRINK doesn't require downtime.

SHRINK Advantages :
downtime not required

SHRINK Disadvantages :
High undo and redo.
Cannot be done nologging.
There are other restrictions on which table can be SHRINKed (see the docs).
Might still require call(s) to MOVE if you want to resize the datafile(s).

MOVE Advantages :
can be done with nologging and parallel
avoiding undo with append

MOVE Disadvantages :
Requires double the space (if you do tables serially, it requires only as much as the largest table, not the sum of all tables)
Requires downtime
Requires an index rebuild

is it possible to do it in ASM? I mean is it possible to to resize/move ASM's datafiles on disks without requiring any downtime at prod database. I wonder it may be possible with some online mirroring algorithms or something like that

I have not come across that in ASM this thing is allowed that a DBA is allowed to move the files like in o/s.ASM already has the files in striped set so there wont be one complete file stored anywhere whch one can move and moreoever,in asm the striping is actualy with asm Allocation Units AU which are moved depending upon the hardware configuration on the fly to maintain the performance across the disk so I dont think that DBA has to be involved there.
Resizing of a file I guess should not be an issue as even in ASM the file is still a file which has allthe options available as like a data file on a nomral o/s.So that should not be a problem.
Aman....

Thx, aman...as most of time i explained myself wrong.
Let say we are using usual file system files as storage. i mount a faster disc drive to my server and want to move some of my datafiles to this new drive. Is it possible to do it online? (i mean everything online)

Lets look from an other point of view, in a highend storage box, when you install new disks, you may mirror data to newly installed disks online and when synchronization completes you can remove old disks from mirror configuration. This allow you to migrate from a disk group to an other online.

We can assume OS drives as disks of ASM. Is it also possible for ASM to migrate data from one OS drive to an other without requiring any downtime at production database. Is there any method for this, like the one mentioned at hardware level.

What i want to achive is to migrate my physical data from an OS drive to another online

Erkan,
I understood you now cpmpletely.Sorry I have a real small brain so io is very slow :).To really tell you the truth,I don't have the idea at the moment but give me some time and I shall come back to you for this with some sure short answer.Till the time lets wait for others to share about it.
Aman....